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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The Odyssey to Germany, pt 1

Hello all! It has been crazy here. We have an apartment and are moving in this weekend, we've got everything but cell phones set up, and C should hopefully be getting his license this week! Once that happens, we're officially mobile. :)

I figured I'd go back to actually getting here, then blog about the pets/housing/ everything else later.

So, if you remember from my earlier posts, C and I decided we'd drive from Sierra Vista to Baltimore. We did this to ensure we'd have our girls with us, and because the Army agreed with us that $3k to ship them was ridiculous. So we stopped in Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, O'Fallon (IL), Union (KY), and then Baltimore. We were on the road from 8/28 to 9/1, then had an overnight in Baltimore.

So, the morning we were flying out from Baltimore, Cody ran around doing little errands, and I was organizing our bags. Looking back now, there's a few things I would've liked to have had, or grabbed in the States where we had more choices. Post on that later too.

Around 2, Cody went and returned our rental car. Our hotel had a shuttle and agreed to let us on there with the girls and all our stuff, so we figured that would make this whole thing a little less stressful. We were right! It ended up being pretty tough just to get us all out using the shuttle, I can't imagine having to do it with rental car return.

We took the 6:20 shuttle to the airport, for our flight at midnight. A little crazy, but since this flight was so packed, it was a great idea. We finangled all our bags into the vestibule between the two sets of doors into the airport. That's as far as we could go, untill we assembled JB's crate. That had a slight hiccup-the metal wingnut C had gotten to secure the kennel didn't fit, so we had to just use the plastic pieces. Then we had to convince JB to get in the crate, not freak out, and load the crate on a push cart. Thankfully, that went ok. ONce that and our other bags were loaded up quickly.

Special note: If you have pets or kids (or both) you can cut the line at check in at AMC in Baltimore. SO THANKFUL for this! We snuck through the HUGE line of people, and got helped nearly immediately. After all my worrying about the crates, the paper work...it was barely a second glance at them, and not expensive at all! You'll be shocked at how not astronomical it ended up being to fly them. So when we finished checking in, we were told to bring the animals back at 10 PM. That was at about 7... so we had 3 hrs, and couldn't go through security. We ate, talked with families on our flight, and answered a lot of questions for kids about how big our dog was.

Finally, 10 rolled around and we dropped the girls off by the check in desk. I was pretty emotional-not only had it been a long day, but these girls are my babies and I would have been devastated had something happened to them.

Going through security was surprisingly simple, and I didn't have to throw out my water. From there we went to our gate, just to be the last group to board. The boarding order was: High rankers, Families with small children (Or really any children, because there were defintely some with teens who took advantage of that. LOL), those travelling in Uniform, and then "Others". We lucked out and had in seat entertainment-not that we got to use it much! We took off around midnight and I only cried a little. It's just hard to leave a family and country that I love...

In the most confusing move, they served a dinner?! I would've much preferred that they give us breakfast, because at 0100, I really don't want food. So we had oreos and drinks, I fell asleep but Cody ordered me a meal (that I ended up not eating), then snacks again in the morning, which we also slept through.

I'll write and publish the journey about once we hit the ground in Germany later; This is long enough as is! Cookies if you made it through. :)
-Jess